from the good-news dept

We just wrote about the bizarre process in the Netherlands, where the Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN was able to get a court injunction to order the Dutch Pirate Party to stop hosting a proxy service that redirected people to The Pirate Bay, and then tried to get the Party in trouble for merely pointing people to links of other proxies that could take them to The Pirate Bay. All of this went way beyond the initial order barring access to The Pirate Bay and (more importantly) was done without letting the Dutch Pirate Party have its side heard by the court. There was an interesting discussion in our comments, in which one individual insisted that completely changing the nature of the original injunction was no big deal, and there was simply no reason for the Pirate Party to be heard from, since there was no adversarial issue to adjudicate. That, of course, is ridiculous -- because a political party was being censored, way outside the bounds of the original injunction.

Thankfully, a court in The Hague seems to be realizing that BREIN keeps changing the rules after the fact. It has said that BREIN can't demand that the Dutch Pirate Party take down a general proxy -- as opposed to the specific reverse proxy that only went to TPB. The more general proxy has to be allowed. Next week, the court will explore more fully if the specific proxy really should have been taken down as well. It's good to see the court recognizing that just because BREIN wants to (impossibly) block all access to TPB, it doesn't get to play whac-a-mole by continually changing what the ruling actually said.

must have been a different judge to have made this decision, going against BREIN, but could have been done just for show.

glad there is going to be but there shouldn't even have to be another case. the original judge was way out of order, biased in fact, by not allowing evidence from both sides to be heard. he is supposed to rule in a JUST manner, instead, he sided with BREIN from the outset and deserves to be severely reprimanded at least! no wonder people have little, if any, faith in the legal systems.

Tomorrow, after the judges at The Hague receive their "information packets" from BREIN, they will reverse their decision.

Information packet includes:

A bunch of manufactured evidence using Hollywood Accounting.
Cash, to cover the judge's time to "understand" the included evidence.
A year supply of Rice-O-Roni the San Francisco treat.
And a copy of the home game.

Re: Infringing File

are you sure that file was infringing? is it more like you don't understand how links work, and how to find out who is actually, physically, hosting the file in question? did you cavity search the file to ensure it was infringing? were there other files in close approximation? what were their names?

I'm not completely convinced that file was infringing unless you can prove otherwise.

Re:

The Pirate Bay does host any content. I serves directions on where to find content elsewhere. Some of that content is infringing in many jurisdiction. Though, importantly, not _all_ of the content is infringing in all jurisdictions. Some content is protected free speech. You don't get to block that stuff.

Thank you, BREIN

I, for one, would like to thank BREIN for pointing me to several good open proxies that I can use to access sites they deemed not worthy for me.

The ISP I have is one of the two that were ordered to block all traffic to a certain site. And ever since then, I hadn't even looked for any way of circumventing, instead I opted to do the civil thing and not download, buy or rent anything backed by these bozos.

But after the overreaching of BREIN with regards to the open proxies of among others the Pirate Party. I decided to try a little civil disobedience and download a show, legally I might add, because not all content on The Pirate Bay is put there illegally.